MLK

River to River

3:07 pm

Thu September 26, 2013

Jane Elliott taught school in Riceville for 20 years. The day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered she divided her third-grade class into blue and brown-eyed groups and gave them a lesson in discrimination.

One day in 1968, the day after the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, Jane Elliott, a teacher in the small town of Riceville, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups…and gave them a lesson in discrimination.

Tue August 27, 2013

Thursday, August 28, marks the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington. Host Ben Kieffer looks back on this historic day with Rev. Milton Cole-Duvall who attended the March when he was a 19-year-old college student and former Iowa state Rep. Wayne Ford who was an 11-year-old boy living in Washington, D.C.

Asian-American civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs has traveled from her home in Detroit to

speak at Grinnell College as part of the campus celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday. She tells Iowa Public Radio's Pat Blank, she wasn't a fan of the idea when it was first proposed. At 97, Boggs continues to be active with a program known as Detroit Summer. It's a project that's been underway for several years involving the city's young people with activities such as gardening and renovating inner city buildings.